January 6, 1999, rebels of the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) launched an offensive against the Sierra Leonean capital, Freetown.

In the early hours of January 6, 1999, rebels of the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) launched an offensive against the Sierra Leonean capital, Freetown, capturing it from government troops and the soldiers of the Nigerian-led peacekeeping force known as ECOMOG, the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) Cease-fire Monitoring Group. The battle for Freetown and the ensuing three-week rebel occupation of the capital was characterized by the systematic and widespread perpetration of all classes of atrocities against the civilian population, of over one million inhabitants, and marked the most intensive and concentrated period of human rights violations in Sierra Leone's eight-year civil war.

As the rebels took control of street after street, they turned their weapons on the civilian population. By the end of January, both government and independent sources estimated that several thousands of civilians had been killed. The rebels dragged entire family units out of their homes. They murdered them, hacked off the hands of children and adults, burned people alive in their houses, rounded up hundreds of young women, took them to urban rebel bases, and sexually abused them. As the ECOMOG forces counterattacked and the RUF retreated through the capital, the rebels set fire to neighborhoods, leaving entire city blocks in ashes and over 51,000 people homeless.1 And, while the RUF took with them almost no prisoners of war, they withdrew to the hills with thousands of abductees, mostly children and young women.

This latest rebel offensive brought to the capital the same class of atrocities witnessed in Sierra Leone's rural provinces over the last eight years and is the latest cycle of violence in an armed conflict that has claimed an estimated 50,000 lives and caused the displacement of more than one million Sierra Leoneans. Since launching the rebellion in l991, the RUF has fought to overthrow successive governments it accuses of widespread corruption, nepotism, and mismanagement of the country's vast diamond and mineral resources. However, since its inception, the RUF has failed publicly and clearly to articulate an alternative political agenda and has consistently committed gross and large-scale atrocities against civilians.

In December 1998, following the capture of the diamond-rich Kono district and subsequently Makeni, Sierra Leone's fifth largest city, thousands of RUF fighters started moving towards the capital. By early January 1999, they had reached the peninsula on which Freetown is located and gathered less than twenty miles west of the capital city. On January 6, the rebels broke through the highly stretched and poorly manned ECOMOG defenses, ill-prepared for a rebel offensive in force, and proceeded to march through the eastern suburbs and straight into the city center.

Sierra Leone Remembrance Day, January 6

January 6, 1999, rebels of the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) launched an offensive against the Sierra Leonean capital, Freetown.